Mrs Tsk *

I’m happy to say that AfterGold — the Japanese art exhibition in the UK Midlands that I helped conceive and curate — has now launched. Here (courtesy of Nick Slater, director of Radar in Loughborough) is a booklet listing the artists and events involved.

Coming from a town (Edinburgh) in which the relatively ancient architecture of my neighbourhood (confusingly called “the New Town”) is constantly maintained, yet never replaced…

…I find it fascinating to see, in Japan, places where the postmodernism of the 1980s and 1990s is crumbling and decaying like an ancient monument. (This is Festivalgate, Osaka, where a 1990s funfair is being demolished.)

Since land is worth more in Japan than the buildings on it, the Japanese constantly demolish and rebuild. The architecture has a much shorter lifecycle than, say, Georgian Edinburgh, which makes many Japanese buildings excitingly topical, evanescent and volatile.

You could say the recent past here is already dated, but that’s a result of the Japanese having the courage to build in the styles of the present, something the British haven’t done much since the 1970s.

As a result, Japanese streets are a goldmine, a Jurassic Park, for aficionados of pomo. This building in Osaka reminds me of Cinema Rise in Shibuya, with its curtained dome.

Apartment blocks in the suburbs often have enthusiastically early-90s forms going on.

Particularly vulgar in their love of pomo artifice are drive-in pachinko arcades.

Tokyo buildings (this one is in Ebisu) often use SITE-style deconstruction in their facades.

This Daikanyama boutique uses a ripped effect.

Here’s a management company office in a run-down part of South Osaka that takes a leaf from Vito Acconci’s book: the table runs from the inside of the office right out onto the street.

An office block in central Osaka…

…whose squared-off lettering reminds me of the Parco logo and “saison culture”.

A 1980s factory in Tokyo whose facade and doorway reference Art Deco.

Postmodernist architecture of the 1980s liked to reference ancient ziggurats and play with the textures of fatigue and decay. But now a lot of Japan’s pomo buildings really are decaying, they’ve started to look like abandoned monuments from another era. Which suits them.

DOURAKU-ANN is a Moveable Japanese Teahouse made by Koji Sakai and Siesta. You can see one being constructed in Italy in this video.

Hisae, Ethan and I had a chance to see one yesterday on the last day of the Self-Matsuri event in Shinsekai, our local “festival of anything-goes” (held in the district presided over by “the god of things-as-they-ought-to-be”, Billiken).

A local artist called Ken Hamasaki — famous for his obsession with the colour red — was offering a “Red Tea Ceremony” entitled “you aRE goD”.

We tried to reserve a sitting — it cost 1000 yen — but it was booked up. Lots of people wanting to “be god”, apparently.

The rooftop was pleasant in the early evening breeze.

There were some attempts going on to make tiny, cubic versions of various traditional Japanese features, like rock and moss gardens.

I’m not sure they’re entirely successful.

But I like the portable teahouse idea. It reminds me of Olly’s ramen in Berlin — Olly designed a portable ramen stall that could be packed into flightcases like the ones musicians use for touring — or even the American tour I did in the 90s, Portable Shibuya.

Just because things are traditional, it doesn’t mean they can’t be portable.

Hijinks at the Self-Matsuri continued today, with a basket worm in a twig cocoon hanging from the ceiling of the Shinsekai shotengae (rather than a cedar tree, which is where such creatures usually dwell). Once up there, he said, he couldn’t go to the toilet all day.

Comedy is a legitimacy crisis followed by the sudden appearance of a cornucopia. That’s the title of the afterword I wrote for the new edition of The Collected Jokes of Slavoj Žižek, a droll book by Berlin-based Norwegian artist Audun Mortensen, seen here hot off the presses.

The book contains every joke cited or paraphrased by Žižek as found in his English publications from The Sublime Object of Ideology (1989) to Living in the End Times (2010). Mortensen printed a single copy in coffee-table format in April 2011. Now the book has been published in an edition of 250 by Flamme Forlag. The catalogue number is Flamme F°117. It’s now on the Flamme website. The new cover is by Yokoland. It shows Freud’s “borrowed kettle”, discussed in my afterword and used twice in The Book of Jokes.

Here’s a short extract from my essay:

Žižek seems to have a brain very much suited to the recognition of particular situational shapes. Thinking about something in the real world, he suddenly recognises that it has the same basic structure as an absurd situation in a joke he’s heard, often from a highly respectable source; Derrida, or Lacan, or Freud.

This technique gives us a refreshing sense of what we might call “the lightness of profundity”. We see the charming playfulness of the great masters of philosophy, and perhaps begin to recognise philosophy itself, at its highest, lightest level, as something akin to laughter and joking; “the smile of the gods”. Certain scenarios in the real world can be as absurd as jokes, self-evidently laughable, no matter how tragic they are.

History, Žižek likes to remind us — citing Marx, himself citing Hegel — plays first as tragedy, then as farce. And laughter at the farcical has a sublime aspect; it allows us to imagine the redundancy of one set of ideas, and the birth of a dizzying plethora of alternatives. Comedy is a legitimacy crisis followed by the sudden appearance of a cornucopia.

A self-matsuri (or “festival of anything goes”, according to the website) is being held in the Shinsekai arcade to celebrate the centenary of the Tsutenkaku Tower. I went along to see what was shaking.

I like David Reinfurt from Dexter Sinister. He seems to be a particular kind of person. I’ve never met him, but just from watching him on video I’d cluster the following adjectives around my impression:

ascetic, enthusiastic, intelligent, uncynical, careful, victorian, particular, prim, brilliant, schizothymic, tidy, scandinavian, serious, post-protestant, atavistic, forward-looking, idealistic, authoritative, didactic, schoolmasterly, bloodless, hieratic, original, humourless, intense, pointed, ambitious, aquarian, elitist, artistic, polite, steampunky, ethical, epicene, desurgent, creative, light, quick

Do you have an enormous package? Then this Welby Cycle is the bicycle for you.

I see this one parked at the Kizu fish market every time I go there to shop at catering supermarket Oda. The Welby name sounds British…

…but this military-grade machine — a lorry amongst bicycles — is actually made locally here in Osaka, according to other people who’ve noticed the long-framed, sturdy things around.